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Günter Grass’s Poem About Israel Provokes Intense Criticism

The German novelist and Nobel laureate Günter Grass has come under intense criticism after publishing a poem saying that Israel, not Iran, was the Mideast’s greatest threat to world peace, Der Spiegel Online reported on Wednesday.

In the poem, titled “What Must Be Said” and published in Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung and several other European newspapers on Wednesday, Mr. Grass said he was tired of “Western hypocrisy” for calling for an end to Iran’s nuclear program while tolerating Israel’s own secretive nuclear program, which has been widely discussed but never officially confirmed.

“Why do I say only now, aged and with my last drop of ink, that the nuclear power Israel endangers an already fragile world peace? Because that must be said which may already be too late to say tomorrow,” Mr. Grass, 84, wrote, after noting the German government’s recent decision to sell Israel additional submarines with what the poem described as the ability “to send all-destroying warheads where the existence of a single nuclear bomb is unproven.”

The poem, which also expressed Mr. Grass’s basic solidarity with Israel, prompted an immediate outcry in a country whose relationship with Israel is complex, defined by many red lines drawn partly by inhibitions and guilt and partly by an acute awareness of the Holocaust, which is taught to every German schoolchild. The Central Council of Jews in Germany called it an “aggressive pamphlet of agitation.” The Israeli Embassy in Berlin issued a statement accusing Mr. Grass of propagating old-fashioned blood libel.

“What must be said is that it is a European tradition to accuse the Jews before the Passover festival of ritual murder,” the statement read. “Earlier, it was Christian children whose blood the Jews allegedly used to make their unleavened bread, but today it is the Iranian people that the Jewish state allegedly wants to annihilate.”

Denouncing the poem on the front page of another German newspaper, Die Welt, Henryk M. Broder, the author of “A Jew in the New Germany,” called Mr. Grass, “the prototype of the educated anti-Semite who means well toward Jews. He is hounded by guilt and feelings of shame but at the same time driven to reconcile history.” (Mr. Broder’s article also incorrectly stated that the poem would also be published in The New York Times.)

The government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, a strong ally of Israel, reacted more coolly. “There is artistic freedom in Germany,” a spokesman for Ms. Merkel said, according to a report on the Web site of The Guardian, “and there thankfully also is the freedom of the government not to have to comment on every artistic production.”

The poem, which ended with a general wish for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, isn’t the first time that the left-leaning Mr. Grass, best known as the author of “The Tin Drum,” has come under the kind of moral spotlight he has made a career of turning on Germany’s establishment, which he has long accused of failing to deal fully with the country’s Nazi past. In 2006, he was widely denounced for hypocrisy when he revealed for the first time, in his memoir “Peeling the Onion,” that he had served in the Waffen-SS at the end of World War II, when he was 17. Mr. Grass has said he was drafted into the unit and never fired a weapon. But his admission, coming after decades of urging Germans to come to terms with their Nazi past, raised awkward questions about why he had waited so long.